Don Ritter is a Canadian artist and writer living in Hong Kong who has been active internationally in the field of digital media and interactive art since 1986. His interdisciplinary artworks and writings integrate fine art, digital media, and ethics. Within Ritter’s video-sound installations, audiences control their experiences through body motion or voice. During his live performances and media façades, video projections are controlled by live music or sound. Ritter's prints and animations since 2015 have portrayed issues of morality and sustainability, and his recent writings examine the relationships between aesthetics, ethics, and digital media.

Ritter’s work has been exhibited in festivals, museums, and galleries throughout North America, Europe and Asia, including SITE Santa Fe (USA), Winter Olympics 2010 Cultural Olympiad (Vancouver), Metrònom (Barcelona), Sonambiente Sound Festival (Berlin), Exit Festival (Paris), Ars Electronica Festival (Linz), and New Music America (New York City). Ritter's most widely exhibited work is Intersection, an interactive sound installation that has been exhibited in eight countries and experienced by 600,000 viewers since 1993. His prints and paintings are held in private collections in USA, Canada, France, United Kingdom, Germany, United Arabs Emirates, and South Korea. Ritter’s work between 1988 and 1993 was mainly performances of interactive video controlled by improvised music. Ritter has collaborated mostly with trombonist George Lewis and also with musicians Nick Didkovsky, Amy Denio, Thomas Dimuzio, Ikue Mori, Geneviève Letarte, Ben Neill, Trevor Tureski, and Tom Walsh. His work has received support and recognition from the Canada Council, The Banff Centre (Canada), Pratt Institute (USA), ZKM (Germany), Ars Electronica (Austria), DGArtes (Portugal), the Goethe Institute (Germany), the European Union Culture Programme (EU), and City University of Hong Kong.

Ritter completed his graduate education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center For Advanced Visual Studies, MIT Media Lab, and Harvard University’s Carpenter Center. He has undergraduate degrees in fine arts and psychology from the University of Waterloo and a diploma in electronics engineering technology from the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology. Ritter's professors included artist Otto Piene (MIT), documentary film maker Richard Leacock (MIT), film theorist Vlada Petric (Harvard), and psychologist Mark Zanna (Waterloo). Ritter worked as a telecommunications and human interface designer at Nortel and Bell-Northern Research for five years before his academic positions. He maintained an art studio in Berlin, Germany from 2006 to 2013, and he has held full-time professorships in art and design at Concordia University in Montreal (1989-1998), Pratt Institute in New York City (1996-2005), Hanyang University in Seoul (2011-2013), and currently at City University of Hong Kong.
"The shock of waking up suddenly from amnesia is painful, which explains, perhaps, the psychological dislocation of perception provoked by Ritter’s art. An artistic counter-strategy of psychological dislocation for the body numbed by the invisible blows of technology."
Arthur Kroker, The Will to Technology and the Culture of Nihilism: Heidegger, Nietzsche & Marx

"His imagery incorporates old love of surrealism on the one hand and fascination with several generations of technology on the other hand, highlighted by flashes of humor and spiced by emanations of angst."
Otto Piene, artist, Professor Emeritus, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

"Although
Ritter uses complex technologies to create aesthetic experiences
for audiences, he is not a technocrat; for him the interaction is
not the aim but the means to test the influences and impacts of
nature, machines and media to human personality."
Jozef
Cseres, curator/writer, Profil Contemporary Art Magazine, Slovakia